IronStar (70 page)

Five more seconds and Tash’ta’s
detector was similarly disposed of. Next Elagai slashed the rope on the far
side of the tethered raft and secured all three log platforms together. The
three rafts began to swing toward the near bank as the river current pulled
them against the remaining tether rope. Rash’koi and Prax’soua dropped the gray
cylinder and ran up the shore where they could haul in the rope.

On the rafts, Elagai sliced the
bindings and freed both children. They could barely stand from the cramps they
had acquired in the night. As the raft drew nearer, Kirrah pulled her hand
beamer. Adrianne swiveled the long fat barrel of the P-6R railgun to cover the
approach, despite the ridiculously short range for the weapon. When the rafts
were within two meters of shore, Elagai bodily threw Akaray to the bank, and
she and Tash’ta plunged into the water and waded ashore.

“
Kirrah’sho!
” Akaray barely
got the word out before Kirrah fell on him like a stooping hawk, swept him up
and ran toward the shuttle. The others followed as fast as they could. Panting
and crying from relief and joy, they stopped under the shuttle’s wing. Kirrah
and Akaray couldn’t seem to stop touching and hugging one another. Tash’ta was
hugging Elagai, to the warrior’s obvious embarrassment. Behind them, the three
rafts bobbed on the end of their tether.

“We want nothing to do with that
raft or anything that touched the Kruss. It could be mined. But I want that
spool of nanowire,” Kirrah said. Her first step in that direction was stopped
by Rash’koi, and he and Prax’soua trotted back down to the river and with a
sharp tug released the fine Kruss filament from its attachment to the far bank.
As they pulled, the nanowire leapt clear of the water and vibrated in a line
all the way across the river, making tiny splashes in the water’s surface. They
carefully used the spool to wind up the deadly stuff, relaxing only when the
pull-ring was locked in position against the takeup reel.

Against every instinct to be
airborne and homeward bound, Kirrah allowed herself to be outvoted by the
combined paranoia of Doris and Adrianne, who insisted on subjecting both
children to a thorough scanning.

While they set up the NMR, Kirrah
said, “Thank you both, Prax’soua, Rash’koi. It would have been only justice to
cut that little creature’s head off with its own nanowire, when it reached for
the
sha’pluuth
. I am sorry we missed the chance, and I wonder what has
become of it.”

“Might it still be holding to the
bottom of the rafts?” asked Rash’koi.

“Whoops,
there’s
something,”
said Adrianne, passing the NMR pickup over Akaray. Kirrah reacted as though
struck, recoiling and then lunging for the boy. He reached into a pocket of his
trousers and pulled out a small flat shiny object, about two by four
centimeters.
Nooo! Not after all this!
Kirrah cried inwardly, and
slapped the object from his hand before it could be detonated remotely. It
landed five meters away on the
not-grass
, everyone stepping smartly back
from it. Akaray began to wail at the unexpected assault from Kirrah, and in
general reaction to the terrors of the last eighteen hours.

While Kirrah hugged the exhausted,
traumatized boy and crooned reassurances, Adrianne took her scanner closer to
the object. In a minute, she went to the shuttle door and returned with a
standard data reader. She bent over the object, returned and sat on the spongy
ground cover beside Kirrah.

“Ma’am, Kirrah, it scans like a
standard data wafer. I put it in that hand reader, set it to broadcast, just
turn your comm to Channel Three…” Together the group listened to the message
the Kruss had left, Doris recording it from the flight deck on the shuttle’s
comm system. The Kruss’ voice came out clearly, overlaid by the AI’s
translation.

« Pssittagk greets ssKirragk.

« Pssittagk regrettably shows
unreadiness to consummate proposed trade. Conditions change. Base gone. No
dishonor.

« ssKirragk learning as trader.
Shows understanding lesson of ‘same coin’.

« ssKirragk still not good
marketer. Potential make good apprentice. Someday, we trade better together,
not competing-merchants.

« Pssittagk adapts priorities.
Family gone. Companions gone. Simpler. Regnum solve several problems for
Pssittagk. Pssittagk now leader, owns planet. Taking vacation. Later Pssittagk
acquire better trade goods, return to bargain with ssKirragk.

« ssKirragk receive number one
marketing lesson now. Pssittagk make ssKirragk gift of two young humans. Free
samples, purchase goodwill with future trading partner. Also future
considerations. Transform Talamae idiom, ‘two lives, not balanced’. » The audio
contained an untranslatable atonal whistling sound, which Kirrah recognized as
the Kruss equivalence to laughter. The alien voice continued:

« Pssittagk depart now. Concern
soldier with long magnetic weapon end partnership before profits begin. Final
word to student-marketer, Kruss proverb: whenever something revealed, by same
act, something else hidden.

« Eat well. Pssittagk closes ears.
»

Kirrah looked at Adrianne, who
looked back at her. Finally, the Marine Corporal said,

“I’ll be damned! A Kruss with a
heart! If it’s dropped off the raft, it could’ve let go anywhere in the last
two or three kay, Kirrah. With that suit, it could walk along the river bottom
and come out anywhere within a hundred kay, either up or down river. We’d be
chance-in-a-million getting a whiff of it on any sensors. For all we know, it
left the river twenty minutes ago and is already halfway to the next country.
Those things can make a good steady fifteen kph on the ground.

“I understand if you want to do a
few sweeps with the shuttle, just don’t pin your hopes on it.”

Kirrah thought for a few seconds.
“No, thank you anyway, I have what I want. Did you hear what it said? A
gift
.”
She hugged Akaray, reached for Tash’ta, hugged her with her other arm. “I
accept its gift. It said ‘two lives not balanced’, I think that means it’s
claiming a debt, and I can’t disagree. We’ll set up a sensor grid when we can,
we’ll find it eventually. And it was wrong about owning the planet, that much I
can assure you. Let’s go home.”

Nevertheless with clearance from
Attila’s
shuttle commander, they destroyed their rafts quite thoroughly from the
air, before setting out on the short remaining flight to Talameths’cha. Kirrah
radioed the steamships to turn back, and left the piloting to Doris.

“Ma’am?” said Ensign Piersall
rather plaintively from the jumpseat where she was still bound. “You let the
Marines loose, is there any reason you can’t untie me?” Kirrah turned, a little
surprised by the perfectly reasonable request, thought a moment, replied:

“Mmmm. I think not. It’s just
another few minutes, Margaret. It might come in handy, at what could be a
very
interesting hearing, to be able to say you were under restraint the entire
time. The less freedom you have to intervene, the less you have to explain of
what you didn’t do. It’s not much to offer, but I figure I owe you whatever I
can give, for the next hundred years or so, anyway.” The young pilot nodded
unhappily.
Probably already thinking about her next interview with Admiral
Dunning
, Kirrah thought sympathetically.
Wonder what she’ll do to her?
Maybe I’d better check with my other ‘draftees’…
She stepped back into the
passenger compartment, looked over an ecstatic Elizabeth Einarson, a blissful
Captain Schmado and family, a sore and weary but happy pair of Talamae children
sitting next to a suddenly-maternal Issthe, a satisfied-looking Lord Tsano, and
finally to a pair of gloomy Marines. As she passed the reporter Kirrah said:

“Recording off until further
notice, Ms. Einarson”. The reporter nodded absently, engaged deeply in a review
of the images already captured. Kirrah continued down the aisle, sat down
opposite the two Marines and asked:

“Why the long faces? We won! Or are
you contemplating your own futures?”

“Any way I figure it, Kirrah,” said
Marcus Warden, “we’re pretty much in drek over our heads. I have absolutely no
regrets, I’m happy for you it worked out the way it did, but it’s time to pay
the piper. Admiral Dunning is going to put two with two pretty damned quick
when she reviews the shuttle’s log. Among other things, it’s going to show us
both sitting here like idiots while you bluffed Margaret out of her beamer.
Then it’s going to show you releasing us when we landed by the river to try the
rescue, and us not immediately attempting to reassert control of the shuttle.
Then
it’s going to show Adrianne taking her P-6R down to the river there, as
backup in case your ambush with the nanowire failed.

“I make it two counts of
dereliction of duty, one violation of a direct order with the rifle, and a
possible conspiracy to mutiny, if the Admiral’s of a nasty turn of mind. Of
course, she’s pretty creative, I may have missed a few of the finer points. Oh
yeah, once she spots Margaret’s video hack, it’ll come out pretty quick that
Corporal Gilman and I have been spending a lot of off-duty hours together here.
Add ‘Violation of Standing Order Forty-Four Dash A
Fraternization-Within-the-Chain-of-Command’, and a possible ‘Conduct
Unbecoming’. I expect we’ll be able to come back for a visit, anywhere between
five and twenty years, depending.” Kirrah sat back and thought a moment.

“Marcus, that’s just not ok. You
two have risked your lives and sacrificed your careers for me, for my adopted
son, for all the humans on this planet. That
has
to be worth more than
twenty years in the stockade.
It is to me
.”

“Unfortunately, ma’am, it isn’t
up
to you,” said Adrianne. “She can’t ignore what we did, or what we failed to
do. Hell, I wouldn’t think much of a commander who
did
ignore it. It’s
just an unfortunate situation for …well, for us.”

“Exactly my point,” Kirrah replied.
“I get my Kruss-free planet and my hostages back, Admiral Dunning gets a
successful mission, the Navy gets
three
unopposed bases in-system, the
Regnum gets a new ally, and for helping us all, you two get dropped down the
lav and the lid slammed down. Nope. Just won’t do.” Two pairs of sober eyes
gazed at her, wondering, not quite daring to hope.

“Look, people,” Kirrah continued.
“If the Regnum Marines don’t want you,
I
do.” At the sound of the belly
thrusters coming on in preparation for landing, Kirrah keyed her wristcomp to
the shuttle’s intercom.

“Doris, set us down in that big
open area inside the city’s west wall, would you? I’d like to preserve a few
options before we return our borrowed shuttle. Tell the
Argosy
we’re
offloading some Talamae citizens, we’ll be back on ‘Roehl Two’ in fifteen
minutes.”

“Aye aye, ‘Warmaster’.”

“So,” Kirrah continued, turning
back to the two Marines, “What I’d like to offer you two, is jobs.” Their faces
both looked satisfyingly surprised. “Talam is making a giant step into its own
future, and I’m going to see that it does so on its own terms. We have a whole
planet to bring into the Civilium, a hundred separate tribes. We have a
renegade Kruss to find, we have a highly disciplined and professional military,
trained in combat with horses, swords and arrows, that needs upgrading and
modernizing. We have our own Navy to build, and did I mention that all this is
fully funded by a new, locally grown food product that extends human lives
almost as much as complete Regnum health care?” At their wide-eyed silence,
Kirrah continued:

“Look, have I mentioned anything so
far, that interests you more than sitting in a Navy stockade for the next
couple of decades? Or shall I go on? It sometimes comes in handy, being the
supreme military commander of a sovereign state, don’t you agree?”

Marcus was getting that glazed look
that meant ‘overload’. Adrianne was looking wistful. She said:

“Ma’am, that’s the most generous
thing I’ve ever heard, and I’d be honored to work for you. But we
can’t
.
There’s the matter of our oaths as Regnum Marines, ma’am. Even if we were
willing to break them, and we’re not, we’d be hunted down as deserters. We
could never leave the planet. And you’ll need people who can do some serious
shopping back in Civilium space, at a minimum. I’m
very
sorry, your
offer is…” her voice just trailed off.

“I’d already thought of that,
sorry, I let the logistics get ahead of the principles. I did
not
mean
to imply you would forswear your oaths. I was thinking more along the lines of
an honorable discharge, or a voluntary assignment to Talamae forces as some
sort of long-term liaison, but with all charges dropped, in either case.” The
shuttle bumped down, Doris’s touch, even with autopilot, not being the
equivalent to Margaret’s finesse.

“You could
do
that, ma’am?”
For all her deadly skills, Adrianne’s face opened like a little girl’s, being
offered a special miracle.

“I think between Lord Tsano and
myself, we could ask the Admiral for a little favor. I doubt she really wants
you reamed the way the system would probably handle your actions. In fact I
wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she thinks you both deserve medals. Not that
she’d give them to you - she has a Navy to run, and while she can sometimes run
it on
right
, she
always
has to run it on
rule
.

“I, on the other hand, know what
you did, and why, and I
am
the rule in Talam, militarily. So I can do
Admiral Dunning the favor of saving you from her unpleasant duty. As I see it,
your choices are between liaison as Regnum Marines, or discharge and service
with us.” At the front of the compartment, the hatch opened and people began
debarking. Seeing thoughtful looks being exchanged between the pair, Kirrah
added,